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Searching by Talking: Analysis of Voice Queries on Mobile Web Search

Published: 07 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The growing popularity of mobile search and the advancement in voice recognition technologies have opened the door for web search users to speak their queries, rather than type them. While this kind of voice search is still in its infancy, it is gradually becoming more widespread. In this paper, we examine the logs of a commercial search engine's mobile interface, and compare the spoken queries to the typed-in queries. We place special emphasis on the semantic and syntactic characteristics of the two types of queries. %Our analysis suggests that voice queries focus more on audio-visual content and question answering, and less on social networking and adult domains. We also conduct an empirical evaluation showing that the language of voice queries is closer to natural language than typed queries. Our analysis reveals further differences between voice and text search, which have implications for the design of future voice-enabled search tools.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '16: Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
July 2016
1296 pages
ISBN:9781450340694
DOI:10.1145/2911451
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 July 2016

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Author Tags

  1. mobile search
  2. spoken queries
  3. voice search

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Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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  • (2024)Engagement With Conversational Agent–Enabled Interventions in Cardiometabolic Disease Management: Protocol for a Systematic ReviewJMIR Research Protocols10.2196/5297313(e52973)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Re-evaluating the Command-and-Control Paradigm in Conversational Search InteractionsProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3679588(2260-2270)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
  • (2024)What do Users Really Ask Large Language Models? An Initial Log Analysis of Google Bard Interactions in the WildProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657914(2703-2707)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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